bothering to look over his shoulder at whatever bullshit image fawks
was projecting onto the screen behind him, Sacco wrenched the mic
from its stand and climbed up on top of the table. People cheered. His
comrades on stage had nervous grins on their faces. They had to suspect
he was up to something.
He looked to his left and saw a heavyset young man holding a card-
board box full of CDs. He looked right and saw another, even more
heavyset kid with another box. They both nodded to him, reaching
into their boxes.
Rick Dakan
41
“Listen!” Sacco shouted into the mic. “Listen! Listen in on what I’ve
got to say. I want you listenin’ to the words comin’ out of my mouth!
I wand you to listen in on the secrets I’m about to spill.” He lowered
his voice to a whisper, amplified with a hiss through the audio system.
“Lissssssten. Do you hear that? Do you hear what the douche bag with
the Star Trek lookin’ earpiece is hearing? Can you listen in on what
the boss man is whispering about over his latte? Shhhh. Listen. What’s
that? Can’t quite hear it?” Someone behind him, down on the stage,
was tugging on his pants leg. Probably Dex. “Be real quiet now. Listen
real hard. Can you hear him now?”
The room was quiet, and Sacco had no trouble hearing the angry
whispers coming from his former friends. The next time Dex tugged at
his cuff, he kicked back and then jumped down in front of the speaker’s
table, shouting, “LET ME HELP YOU HEAR!”
His two paid accomplices, New York college kids who’d worshiped
Hacks of Rebellion since they were fifteen-year-old script kiddies, started
tossing handfuls of CDs into the audience. Sacco had snatched the
burned copies of Listnin from Dex’s car and replaced them with blank
CD’s he’d bought up from every drug store within twenty blocks. He’d
written labels on the top dozen or so in each box, just in case someone
checked. If his co-conspirators online were holding up their end too,
there were a dozen different torrents being seeded with the software
right now. He pulled out some disks of his own from inside his jacket
and spun them out in long, floating arcs towards the middle of the audi-
ence. Hackers ducked, jumped, and snatched for the silver disks. Some
rose up and mobbed his paid helpers, but instead of stopping them they
were reaching into the boxes and tossing out even more CDs. Fawks cut
his mic, and the jerks on the stage behind him were screaming bloody
murder. Sacco laughed and laughed and laughed, hopping down from
the stage as he tossed the dead mic over his shoulder.
He made his way through the crowd towards the exit. He wasn’t
going to answer any questions or make any more speeches. The software
would speak for itself (and listen too). Dex came running up behind
him by the time he reached the bank of elevators. He started yelling
all the things Sacco expected him to. They had a deal. There’d been a
vote. He was a fucking asshole. They were kicking him out. How dare
he break into Dex’s car. Sacco stood there and took it for a while, just
letting Dex vent and rage. He figured it would do the guy some good
to get it all out, and there wasn’t a thing he could say that would affect
Sacco in the least. He missed the first elevator to come, but decided
to get on the next one. Quite a crowd was lurking about them now,
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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
listening in, and Sacco wanted to get outside. He jumped on the already
packed elevator at the last moment, leaving no time or room for Dex
to join him. He thanked the others inside for their kind words and
encouragement on the way down. Stepping into the hotel lobby, he
took a moment to decide which way to exit, looking left, in the general
direction of a bar he liked, and then right, towards the front entrance
and… and the girl with the pink hair.
She was holding a CD, spinning it around on her raised middle finger
and smiling at him. He walked over to her.
“Nice speech,” she said.
“You liked it?”
“Just the end part. Most of the stuff before it was pretty lame.”
He nodded to the spinning disk on her finger. “And you got one of
my CDs.”
“I got two of them,” she said, winking. Oh that wink. “Now, are
you going to buy me a beer and explain to me how this Listnin thing
of yours works?”
“Absofuckinglutely.”
She laughed with such genuine delight at that, that she almost seemed
like a different person for a split second. “Well come on then, cowboy,
let’s go.”
He followed her out the front door, thinking that this HOPE hadn’t
turned out so disastrous after all.
Paul still wasn’t used to this part. It thrilled him. He looked up and
down the list of e-mails—two and a half years worth of e-mails—
and clicked randomly on one of them. It was something about a piece of
Florida State House legislation having to do with land use regulations,
but as dull as it was, it still sent micro-currents of excitement coursing
down the back of his neck. He was not supposed to be reading this, and
yet he totally was. Next to him on the couch Chloe was going through
another massive download. At the table Sacco and Sandee were going
through others. Their Data Guy on the outside had it all too, and was
running his password crackers and his analysis software on all of it.
C1sman’s painstaking hack had worked—they’d owned the target’s
network and, best of all, no one seemed to have noticed.
There was nothing in any of his former lives that compared to these
thrills, this level of excitement. An aspiring and then mildly successful
comic book artist for the first decade of adulthood, his life had been ink
stained and scrabbling for attention at comic book conventions. Then he
though he’d hit the big time when his childhood friend turned dot com
millionaire agreed to finance his brilliant idea for a video game. The
game had turned out pretty good, but Paul had turned out to be a pretty
crappy video game designer, mostly in the area of working with others
in his own company. They’d fired him and in a moment of despair and
desperation he’d met this crazy-hot woman named Chloe who offered
him a chance to get his revenge. If he was willing to break some walls.
Considering the much nastier and less practical revenge plots that’d
44
Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
been romping through his mind, Chloe’s plan had seemed practically
reasonable. They ended up walking out of the meeting where he was
supposed to get his ass handed to him with a check for $800,000. Of
course then things got complicated.
In the end he lost the money, lost his friends, and was wanted by law
enforcement for questioning on suspicion of fraud and kidnapping.
But he’d gotten the girl, and that was worth something. That was, in
fact, pretty much worth everything. Chloe’d sacrificed her friends to
stay with him—everyone but Bee—and they’d set up a new life in Key
West. They still stole from people, but Paul needed some good reason,
some moral excuse that allowed him to sleep at night. He knew that,
at least some of the time, he was just lying to himself. But he’d gotten
really good at lying, even to himself. Still, when this opportunity to
strike out against a genuine bad guy in the world had come along, Paul
had been excited. As high as the tension was, as dangerous as things
had gotten, he was sleeping better now than he had in years. Well,
metaphorically sleeping. In reality there wasn’t time to sleep much at
all, but he felt good about that too.
Paul opened another random e-mail. Again it was inscrutable to
him, full of legal jargon and inside politics talk. There was no way
he was going to be able to parse anything useful out of this stuff, but
he didn’t expect to. This was pure voyeurism until the analyses came
in from outside and they’d found the specific files and e-mails they
needed. After he’d escalated privileges all the way and completed the
data dump, c1sman had collapsed back onto the couch in an exhausted
heap of frayed nerves. Paul had sent him downstairs to Shmoocon
with Bee to have some fun and mingle with the nice law-abiding
hackers and security professionals. He wanted c1sman’s mind focused
on the familiar, or better yet, distracted by the “secret” crush that
everyone but Bee knew he had on Bee. Let them play and keep tabs
on the network down there—as part of the NOC team, c1sman had
full access—as long as no one noticed that they’d piggybacked in on
the con’s bandwidth and experimental TOR server set up, they were
golden.
“Well, it’s started, finally,” Chloe said. She had a third laptop, a little
ultra-portable, propped up on the armrest. It had a copy of Outlook on
it that would mirror every action on the target’s system. Yet another,
identical ulta-portable next to that had a similar setup monitoring
e-mails from the Congressman and his staffer. Between the Blackberry
hack (which got them into the staff’s Exchange server), and c1sman’s
network hack on the target’s office, there wasn’t any e-mail between
Rick Dakan
45
the two of them that they weren’t going to see. There had been a few
moments setting it all up where Paul had held his breath in nervousness
as they’d inserted the rest of their malicious code and hacks into the
target computers. The malware on the Congressional aide’s Blackberry
had given them access to all his e-mail, but they wanted to do more
than just monitor his messages—they needed to be able to write
their own. But at the same time they needed to make sure he didn’t
notice that someone else was sending mail from his account, with the
added complication that everything he sent was cc’d to both his lap-
top and his phone. Sacco’s first move after owning the Blackberry was
to upload more malware onto the phone to make sure Danny didn’t
notice the changes. Then they’d sent a false message from Danny to
the Congressman that included the same piece of malware they’d used
to infect the first phone. There’d been a lot of concern at this point,
especially about whatever added security the US House of Reps IT
department might have installed, but as far as they could tell it all went
as planned. They then installed the same back doors and stealth mea-
sures on the Congressman’s machines. Now it was time to start press-
ing their advantage and use their newly stolen Congressional influence
to maximum effect.
While they waited for their outside analysis to dig up the dirt, they
had other work to do. Chloe moved one of the ultra-portables over so
Paul could read it. They’d built in a minute-long delay into both e-mail
accounts so they’d have a chance to read the messages before they went
out and either delete or change them as needed. Paul scanned an e-mail
from Danny to the target and keyed F10, the hotkey they’d set up to
intercept outgoing mail.
The original read:
From: [email protected]
Subject: Referral
Hey Ken,
Wondering if you had some spare time for a referral. TC is
working on some legislation to help entertainment indus-
try protect their IP from a new piracy threat and has some
ideas about inserting procurements to fund new enforce-
ment efforts. Ent. Ind. will need support from multiple
C’s for this I’m sure, since they’re fearing a big hit to their
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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
bottom lines. Hoping you could do some coordinating for
us on this.
Thanks,
D
Paul wasn’t sure what TC meant at first, but it clearly referred to
Congressman Wolverton. The e-mail showed that Danny and the tar-
get were well acquainted with one another and that the staffer wasn’t
shy about asking for favors. Paul assumed that the line about support
from multiple C’s (congressmen?) and the mention of the entertainment
industry’s bottom line was Danny’s way of saying there was plenty of
money to go around. That was good. It confirmed their supposition
that the target was in it for the money first and foremost, and as long
as Paul kept the promise of a profit in his forged e-mails, he would be
speaking the right language. He was a little worried that Danny and
the target were so familiar with each other though—that meant he had
to be extra careful with the forgeries to not write anything the target
might find out of character. He dumped the e-mail into a folder on his
desktop and prevented it from being passed on to Clover. If everything
went as planned, Clover would never even know that the Congressman’s
aide had been sending him any e-mails at all.
Paul sat back and waited what seemed like a reasonable amount of time
before readying his “reply” from Clover. Danny was e-mailing a lot, and
Paul was keeping up with it as best he could. The target was e-mailing
too, although not as much. Everything else seemed pretty business as